A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
Like pretty much anyone else paying attention to the story, I was stunned to see the images of protests in Hong Kong, with people of all ages donning black to rail against Beijing’s plan to enact national education. Hong Kongers deemed it brainwashing, a paternalistic move from Beijing to inculcate the special territory into its ways. The sheer scale of…
Continue readingHong Kong Citizens’ Online, Memetic Protest
A short story called Raising Whales by Xiang Zuotie. Excerpt clipped from a post on Prospect Magazine.
At dusk one evening, as cooking smoke started rising from the roofs of the houses, the head of our village came back from market with baby whales for everybody. We were going to develop the local whale-farming industry,…
Continue readingFeatured illustration + fiction
This is a collaborative post between Lyn Jeffery and Jason Li. Lyn begins by writing…
Crowdsourcing has been around for awhile (this 2006 Wired article nicely lays out the concept). Over the last three years, crowdsourcing has been applied to fundraising with stunning results on Kickstarter and Indiegogo (“Go fund yourself”), and…
Continue readingSupporting creativity wins on Chinese crowd-sourcing platform Demohour
A graduate school project by Vancouver-based designer Vince Lo, the Collator font purports to create a font that melds English letters and Chinese characters together into a non-jarring stream of text.
Collator is a typeface designed to achieve greater harmony between Chinese characters and Latin letterforms when set together. Drawing inspiration from the two traditions of…
Continue readingA font that promises to balance Chinese and English
Above: An excerpt from a six-page comic about Cheng I Sao.
Below: Excerpts from a CNN mental floss article about her:
The most successful pirate of all time controlled a fleet of more than 1,500 ships and upwards of 80,000 sailors — and she did it all without the help of facial hair.…
Continue readingCheng I Sao: the biggest pirate in history was Chinese and female!
Blogs on China have come and gone over the last decade. Then twitter came and everyone stopped blogging in 2006. Long form analysis was shrunken to 140 characters. But then something magical happened, a resurgence of blogs on China bursted onto the internet over the last few years!
One of the longest standing and most important blogs, Danwei, is…
Continue reading88 Bar Receives Runner Up in Danwei’s Model Worker Award 2012!
Today we’re pleased to announce a new partnership with Tea Leaf Nation, a new web site dedicated to pulling insights from China’s lively microblogsphere. Their team, scattered around the world, have shared some amazing insights, offering translations, context and images, all with a touch of quirky humor. I had the pleasure of working with TLN’s founder,…
Continue readingChina’s “Fat Police Officer” Terrorizes Everything [TLN]
Mr. Sea Monster (海怪先生), a cafe in Gulangyu (鼓浪屿), Xiamen.
Exact address: 鼓浪屿乌埭路2号
Via Samantha Culp. Photo sources: 1, 2.
On June 4, I was invited to talk about middle class discontent on BBC World’s live program Impact. Since it was June 4, as a self-protection I again spoke optimistically about the future of Chinese middle class. The truth is even my friends and I, considering ourselves part of China’s middle class, often swing between extreme optimism and pessimism about…
Continue readingMiddle Class Losers